Michael King had taken his seat on the stage in the Petco Park auditorium last December when he began laying out all the reasons for his return to San Diego.
No, his market wasn’t what he envisioned after an injury-riddled 2025 season. But he enjoyed his time in Southern California, he and his wife welcomed their first child as San Diegans, pitching in front of sellout crowds was invigorating and, quite frankly, King trusted that the man seated to his left would continue to put the Padres in a position to win.
King’s feelings about A.J. Preller haven’t changed one bit.
He doesn’t expect the next two-plus weeks to drastically alter the intentions of the Padres’ president of baseball operations.
“I’ve been here for three years now, and I’ve never been able to get into AJ’s head,” King said. “But I mean, part of the reason why I signed here was because I felt like he was always going to put a winning product on the field.
“I think he’ll know where we’re at when the time comes and I put a ton of faith in what he does.”
It would certainly help matters to carry their current roll into the weekend.
A 31-20 start gave way to a stretch in which the Padres went more than two weeks without winning back-to-back games and nearly two months between winning consecutive series. A sweep of the Atlanta Braves, baseball’s best team when they arrived at Petco Park on Monday, marked the Padres’ first three-game winning streak in more than a month and began a grueling gauntlet leading into the All-Star break.
The next 17 games include seven contests against the two-time defending World Series champion Dodgers, a series against the Cubs team that bounced the Padres out of last year’s NL Wild Card Series, and a homestand against a Diamondbacks team on their heels in the NL West standings and the defending AL champion Blue Jays.
The trade deadline looms after that, but the Padres aren’t thinking about what they have to do to convince their ultra-aggressive general manager to add to the team, let alone the implications of another series with the rival Dodgers.
“That’s honestly last thing on my mind,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said at the start of the homestand. “We’ve got to play good today, keep the good feelings going, keep the good swings going, play baseball the right way. We’re doing a great job on defense. We’re doing a great job on base running. Bullpen’s been crushing it.
“We get a little bit better on the mound (with) starting pitching, we start hitting a little bit better early in games, we’re going to be humming pretty good and then the rest of that stuff will take care of itself.”
Without a trade, true impactful upgrades to the rotation might not occur until Nick Pivetta and/or Joe Musgrove make their way back to the active roster, possibly in the weeks after the All-Star break.
Meantime, the offense is at least trending ever so slightly in the right direction.
A lineup with the worst OPS (.594) in the majors from the end of April through June 7 has ticked up to .717 (22nd) over the last 15 games.
Positive trends include Fernando Tatis Jr. slugging a bit more but also hitting .324/.370/.500 during an 18-game on-base streak. Manny Machado’s .184 batting average remains the worst in the majors, but he has two game-winning hits in the last week, leads the Padres with 14 homers and has an .835 OPS over his last 15 games. Other positive developments since June 8 include signs of life from Jackson Merrill (.699 OPS) and Xander Bogaerts (.698 OPS), Samad Taylor leading the team with an .894 OPS over that stretch and Jake Cronenworth finally beginning a rehab assignment on Thursday with Triple-A El Paso.
Pushing those narratives forward for the time being means more than this weekend’s series against the Dodgers or next week’s four-game trek to Chavez Ravine.
“I think at this point you know it’s just important to keep stacking wins however we can get them,” said Ty France, who is third on the team with nine homers. “The good thing is we’re playing good baseball right now, so you know it’s going to be a fun weekend series against the Dodgers.”
The Padres were having fun the last time they matched up with the Dodgers.
King outdueled Yoshinobu Yamamoto in a 1-0 win that pushed the Padres a half-game up on Los Angeles in the NL West. It was a fleeting lead as the Padres dropped the next two games against the Dodgers and 15 of their next 21 games. Now, sitting nine games behind the Dodgers in the division and a half-game out of wild-card spot to begin Thursday’s off-day only crystalizes priorities that they insist were in place when Dave Roberts last brought his team to Petco Park.
“Do the same thing we did last time,” Merrill said of the weekend series. “We played baseball. I don’t think any of us thought of winning the division in that series. It was (May). It was early. I don’t think anyone was in that mindset.”
Added King: “It’s not like we just need to bring it against our division opponents. This last road trip was not a fun one for us. We know that those are the teams that we’ve got to take care of and we didn’t do it. Now it’s a little bit more pressure for the rest of the season on making sure that we’re doing the best we possibly can to put out a good product.”